Ask AdaMarie: What if My Job Doesn’t Make Me Happy?
Sienna: I’ve seen so many people hate their jobs. I’m scared I’ll end up in the same place. What if my job doesn’t make me happy?
AdaMarie: Sienna, I hear you. I feel you. I’ve been you! I remember starting out on my career journey and asking myself this same question. I think your question is a deep one, so let’s dig into it and start by breaking down the core assumptions.
Let me tell you it is a downright lie that a job, or anything that lies outside of yourself, is going to make you happy. That’s not to say a job should make you feel miserable: it shouldn’t. You are allowed to want to be happy! This is your life! But staking your hopes for happiness in an external condition is a clear recipe for making you very unhappy.
You’re not alone in asking this question. Many of us are running this toxic cultural myth around externally derived happiness and it's hurting everybody. Our job - if we’re going to get to any kind of happiness - is to divest from this harmful narrative within ourselves.
Where did this belief in a job equalling happiness come from? Our culture feeds us so many stories about people finding happiness (defined as purpose and spiritual fulfillment) in their jobs… but we don’t get a lot of education as to what a job actually is, and the healthy role it should play in our lives. One great tool that helps us move from tunnel-vision thinking to holistic thinking is The Wheel of Life.
The bottom line is: loading up the expectation of ‘Happiness’ - capital H - on a job is so much pressure! Tbh, asking any one facet of your life – be it a job, a romantic relationship, a friendship, a spiritual practice – to exclusively make you happy is too much pressure. Your life, and you, are multi-faceted and complex. Your happiness will be a unique recipe of different ingredients, coming together in a way that only you can know; and will take a long time, maybe even your whole life, for you to discover. Also, those ingredients can change as you change. That’s ok! It’s the heart of this beautiful journey we are all on.
But how do we release the pressure to ‘be happy’?
Inner Investigation.
The first part of releasing the pressure is to investigate when and where you started to believe this toxic myth. Grab a journal and travel back in time. Most of the time, these roots lie in our childhood.
📓 Journal prompts:
Where did you get the idea that a job = happiness? Does this idea belong to you, or is it an external idea that you learned? If external, can you identify where this story came from - a person, a culture, an actual story e.g. a movie?
What specifically about a job are you anticipating you might hate? Name the ‘enemies’ to your happiness. If you’re a job-seeker, these are projections from your own psyche, filling the vacuum of real experience.
Ground in Reality, not Fantasy.
Get curious as to what real happiness actually looks and feels like. Observe people in your life who feel like they embody true happiness and ask yourself what they can teach you.
📓 Journal prompts:
List 3 people in your life who seem truly happy. What do you observe about them? What do you think makes them happy? What role does their work play for them? What else do they do aside from work?
Here’s an amazing fact:
When laying on their deathbeds, the number 1 regret most people have, is they didn’t choose to be happier. This would suggest happiness has more to do with acceptance versus attainment. Happiness is an internal choice, not an external condition. This is life, it’s never going to be perfect.
Give the Idea an Internal Re-brand: Given that the word happiness is culturally corrupted, perhaps it’s helpful to sub it out for ‘joy’. Joy is an energy that we can be open to receive, that can fill our cup and lights us up. It’s a peak human experience, but it leaves room for the rest of being human: joy can co-exist with grief, with rage, with peace.
📓 Journal prompts
Where in your life have you experienced/ do you experience joy?
📚 For more on Joy, read the book: Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
